Leak says that AMD Navi 10 can compete with Nvidia RTX 2080

AMD Radeon RX
(Picture: AMD)

The leaked AMD Navi graphics cards serve the mid-range sector up to the RTX 2070. However, there might also be a Navi 10 variant as RTX 2080 opponent.

AMD Navi: 7nm could turn the market upside down

After the disaster with RX Vega, AMD has the chance again with the new Navi generation to steal Nvidia a larger market share in the graphics card sector. The new Turing generation currently offers few incentives, especially for the mainstream market. The increase in performance beyond raytracing and DLSS is also rather moderate. An inexpensive offer with good performance could therefore be the key to a new boom for AMD. The last leak already mentions three graphics cards with the names RX 3060, RX 3070 and RX 3080. The RX 3080 is supposed to achieve approximately the performance of the RTX 2070, but costs only 250 US Dollars.

Navi could be so revolutionary because the manufacturing process becomes much smaller. As with Ryzen 3000, AMD relies on TSMC’s 7nm process for the new graphics card generation. Due to the small structure width, there are several possibilities that Navi could push forward. On the one hand, the die size shrinks very much. On the other hand, the transistor density also increases. A 250 mm² chip could thus have more transistors than an RTX 2080 Ti. Even if the chip is smaller, a Navi chip could achieve the performance of the RTX 2080 or even higher. This theory is now confirmed by another leak.

Navi 10 to be as fast as RTX 2080

The information comes from the Chinese Chiphell forum. According to the post of a user, the chip with the name Navi 10 is also supposed to be targeting the RTX 2080. The last leak from AdoredTV showed that the first versions are probably intended for the mainstream market. The RX 3060 and RX 3070 are supposedly based on Navi 12, a smaller chip. This information also coincides with a leak that confirms that AMD could launch a 40 CU Navi version in the first half of the year. The larger version of Navi bears the name Navi 10 and will be used in the RX 3080. However, the RX 3080 might not be the fastet version of Navi 10. According to Chiphell, the launch will take place in the second or third quarter, which is in line with AMD’s own statements. It might therefore be possible that the company will initially present only the already leaked Navi derivatives or even only the RX 3060 and RX 3070 with Navi 12 chip at CES 2019 and launch Navi 10 later as RX 3080 and RX 3090.

No raytracing with Navi, high energy efficiency

The leak on Chiphell contains more information. Navi is supposed to be especially efficient. It literally means that Navi 10 should offer high-end performance with a surprising energy efficiency. We assume that the surprise will go in the direction of high efficiency and therefore low consumption and not vice versa. The second detail relates to Nvidia’s real-time raytracing. The Navi generation should therefore have no raytracing hardware at all, which is actually just logical. AMD itself has said about raytracing that it only supports the technology if the mainstream user would also benefit from it.

How realistic the information is will probably only become apparent at CES 2019. But our comparison of TSMC’s manufacturing techniques shows that Navi could very easily play a role in the high-end market. The transistor density of the 7nm process is so high that even with a small chip the performance of a RTX 2080 would easily be achieved.

About Florian Maislinger 1222 Articles
Florian Maislinger is author and founder of PC Builder's Club. As a skilled IT engineer, he is very familiar with computers and hardware and has been a technology lover since childhood. He is mainly responsible for the news and our social media channels.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*